Ep 70 – Walking with the Enemy – Hungarian WWII History Unpacked (with our friend Katie!)

In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we review Walking with the Enemy (2013), exploring its depiction of WWII Hungary, the life of Elek Cohen (loosely based on Pinchas Rosenbaum), and the country’s political shifts during the war. We discuss standout performances, the film’s narrative choices, and are joined by our friend Katie, who shares insights into Hungary during WWII.

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm married you.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the reviewer.
This week we are talking about the movie Walking with the
Enemy, which came out in 2013, is directed by Mark Schmidt and

(00:22):
scripted by Kenny Gold and Mark Schmidt.
The film depicts what happened at the highest echelons of
government in Hungary during theclosing months of World War 2,
while at the same time followingthe life of a young man who Dons
an s s uniform to rescue fellow Jews from the Holocaust.
And it is loosely based on true events.
You can watch it on Apple TV andwe are lucky enough to have a
guest with us today, our friend Katie, who lives in Hungary and

(00:45):
is here to provide us with some information about Hungarian
history. So welcome, Katie.
Thank you for having me. Let's talk about our general
impressions of the movie. What did you think, Mark?
I don't know what I want to say about this movie.
I really like the story. I thought it was all really
interesting. I thought the movie making
wasn't too good. I felt like some of the things

(01:08):
were really like quick and otherthings were quite slow.
So I was like, what's going on with the spacing?
And they're trying to tell two stories at once.
Sounds like maybe they should have decided to tell some, but
not all of it. I thought it was quite all over
the place, even though all of itwas quite interesting.
I feel like that could have madetwo separate movies instead of

(01:31):
all of it in one go. But there's a nice little
surprise in there for us. Like to roll.
Get to that, I think when we getto it.
In what the accents in this are,I don't know if they're good.
I can't tell. If they make me laugh, there's
that. The acting's fine.
The cast is interesting. I don't know, I didn't think it

(01:53):
was a waste of time. I've seen better movies though.
How about you? Yeah, I do agree that the
accents were something. Maybe this sounds ignorant of
me, but I'm like, maybe they just thought that could slide
because a lot of people don't know what a Hungarian accent
sounds like. It's sort of vaguely Central
European. I don't know, maybe Katie has
thoughts. Maybe all the accents were great
and it just they just sounded a bit variable to me.

(02:19):
Yeah, they were all over the place.
I felt so bad for poor Jonas Armstrong.
Like I felt so bad for him. He was really doing his best.
It is a hard accent. I could see why in the Brutalist
they used AI to kind of alter their accent, but they gave it
the good college try and a for effort, I suppose.
It's not an easy accent. I do agree with what you said,

(02:39):
Mark. I think that as I was writing
the notes to the movie, it became clear to me that some of
the one plot line would happen, and then it didn't really seem
to have any immediate bearing onthe other plot line.
And the two stories were perhapsa bit too disparate from each
other. But yeah, I mean, I always enjoy
an opportunity to learn something new, and I didn't

(02:59):
really know a lot about Hungary and World War 2.
I did think there were some scenes in this movie that were
particularly well acted. There was 1 scene where he's
trying to save the sister of hisgirlfriend and she ends up
getting killed anyways. And I just thought that like her
acting in that scene, something about it was really gripping to

(03:20):
me. Like I found that particularly
emotionally effective. So there were some really
standout performances in this movie and some female
characters, which we always like.
What did you think of it, Katie?I definitely agree with you with
the acting. There were a lot of stand out
moments and that scene was probably my favorite.
I do appreciate a movie that doesn't pull any punches.

(03:40):
It would be so easy for them to save the sister there and they
did not. I think the inspired by at the
beginning is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I'm glad that
they said that, and I'm glad that they changed the main
character's name for what the movie set out to do.
I think they accomplished it. It's always great to see movies

(04:03):
about oppressed people taking their fate into their own hands.
That doesn't happen a lot, I feel like, in the World War 2
genre. So for that it was pretty good.
Carl Lutz definitely does deserve his own movie
eventually. Maybe we could jump into getting
a little bit of context. I personally didn't know a ton
about what Hungary was up to during World War 2, beyond the

(04:24):
very broad strokes that it was allied with Germany for much of
it. So yeah, I would love to just
get a little bit of context and background for this movie that
could maybe help out our listeners who are casual
appreciators of World War 2 history.

(04:45):
All right, so I apologize if this does sound like kind of
drinking from a fire hose at first, because things move
pretty fast at one point. We do start out with Hungary's
getting into World War Two. We have to go back to the end of
World War One and the Treaty of Trinon because Hungary's on the
losing side of World War One. In the treaty, they lose 3/4 of

(05:08):
their territory and 2/3 of theirpopulation.
At this point Hungary is very anti Bolshevik and you'll see
they'll grow increasingly more anti-Semitic as time goes on.
In the 1920s, right after World War One, Mikola Shorthy is
elected Regent and Paul Talecki is Prime Minister right at the

(05:33):
beginning. To kick off his premiership,
Talecki passes a law, the numerous clauses in 1920, which
restricts who is permitted to goto university in Hungary.
It's supposed to reflect the makeup of their population,

(05:53):
which greatly reduces the numberof Jews that are allowed into
the university. By treating Hungarian Jews as
their own ethnicity, it essentially strips them of their
identity as Hungarians and it treats them as a separate ethnic
group. This numerous clauses.

(06:13):
It's pretty important to note that it's the first anti-Semitic
law in post tree and in Europe. It kind of shows that Hungary at
this point isn't doing anything influenced by allies or future
allies. It's kind of doing this of their
own accord, which I think is pretty important.
The next kind of anti-Semitic law to come on the books is in

(06:35):
May of 1938. It's called the first Jewish law
which caps Jewish employment in certain fields at 20%.
This includes white collar jobs,business, industry, all the way
down to retail to kind of show the impact of this.
At this point, Hungarian Jews make up 60% of doctors in the

(06:55):
country, 51% of lawyers, 39% of engineers and chemists, 34% of
editors and journalists, and 29%of musicians.
Putting it in the numbers like that, overnight the country
loses about 40% of its doctors alone.
So this isn't just affecting Hungarian Jews, it's having an
impact on everybody across the country.

(07:18):
So Powell Tilecki, who oversaw the first couple of restrictions
put on Hungarian Jews, tried to keep Hungary largely out of the
conflict. I think there's some trauma
leftover from World War One there.
And when he saw the way things were going that Hungary would be
sucked into this pretty badly. Yeah, he committed suicide.

(07:40):
So Miklos Horthy is Regent and he is a self-proclaimed anti
Semite. In a letter that he writes to
one of his ministers, he basically says it in plain
language, just like that. He says he's been a lifelong
anti Semite, that he goes as faras to not having any interaction

(08:02):
with Jews in his daily life. He says that he's kind of sick
of seeing them in every walk of life, in every profession that
he comes across. And he hates that when people
outside of Hungary think a stereotypical Hungarian, their
first mental image is that of a Jewish person.

(08:25):
So not not great. It's pretty gross what he says.
Later, he writes an autobiography, and he says I was
only trying to make the least damning choices, like I was only
trying to do the best for all people.
And I'm like, really? After you've just said that in
your ministers, you're still gonna try and defend what you've

(08:49):
done? I mean, we see this more often,
I guess, but I just don't understand how people think that
that's gonna go unnaticed. Yeah, the movie makes the really
interesting choice to take his word for it on that one.
He's kind of a good guy, isn't he?
Out of all of them, he's made out to be the style guy who runs
Peace. Yeah, it's so wild the amount of

(09:11):
character rehabilitation that he's trying to do in his book
and what they're trying to do inthe movie as well.
Like we see you for what you are, Guy.
So in May of 1930 9 we see the second Jewish law passed which
further defines Jews racially. So basically if you have more
than one grandparent that identifies the Jewish either

(09:35):
ethnically or religiously, you are classified ethnically as a
Jew, which further strips peopleof their rights as Hungarians
further strip some of their identity.
On November 20th of 1940, Hungary becomes the 4th country
to join the Axis with the signing of the Tripartite Pact,

(09:56):
which kind of feels like little brother energy to be totally
honest with you. When you're the 4th 1 to the
third at, you know, Trey is in the name.
I feel like there's this poor clerk somewhere who has like a
background in Latin. Like can't call it this anymore
you guys. And all the other ones are like

(10:16):
what Hungary's involved. Like Hungary?
Who? Yeah, right.
Like it's, you know, it's the big three.
It's Germany, Italy and Japan. And then like and Peggy, you
know. Yeah, like I said, little
brother energy and here comes Hungary.
Like I'm part of this too, you guys.
Yeah, remember. Remember how I was part of this
the last time? Remember that.

(10:38):
Do we know in what circumstancesthat joined the Axis fires?
Are they threatened? Are they doing it for their?
Of course they're doing it for their own gain at that point,
but do we know anything about that?
They see siding with the Axis asthe best way to get their old
territory back. So to kind of understand

(10:59):
anything that Hungary does, you have to understand how traumatic
the Treaty of Treenan was to them.
And that drives just just about every decision they make.
It's who can get us our old territory back.
The treaty also, it's funny how it has this almost domino effect
on why Hungarian Jews are singled out as the minority to

(11:23):
pick on. Because the treaty, when it
carves down Hungary and takes away 3/4 of its territory and
2/3 of its population, it carvesaway the Romanian ethnic
minorities, the Slovak ethnic minorities.
And so the Jews become the ethnic minority.
And that's why I think they're singled out.

(11:43):
So they kind of look around and they're reading the room and
they're like, well, I think Germany is actually the
strongest. So let's side with them.
Let's do this. So they joined the Axis in 1940
and pretty much most immediatelyin 1941, they're already
participating in battles. They're in the invasion of
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.And the Hungarian soldiers are

(12:08):
noted particularly for their brutality.
I read one thing that said a German officer named it murder
tourism. So that's a little, yeah, it's a
little brutal to kind of give you an idea.
And then through these battles, Hungary starts annexing their
old territories into their possession from Czechoslovakia,

(12:28):
Romania and Yugoslavia. In August of 1941, the third
Jewish law is passed. It prohibits marriages and
sexual relationships between Jews and non Jews.
September 1942 sees the 4th Jewish law being passed.
It bans Jews from owning or purchasing land.

(12:50):
During this time, Hungarian Jewshave also lost the right to vote
and the year employment numbers are further reduced from that
20% cap in all those various fields to a 12% cap in 1942.
Miklos Calais is elected Prime Minister.
This is when Germany begins pressuring the Hungarian

(13:11):
government to start deporting their Jewish population to
German territories. Up until now how they've been
pretty protected from the fate that all of the other European
Jews have succumbed to Calais and horothes refused to comply.
They say that their own people are their own issue, they'll

(13:34):
handle it in house. They also say that deporting so
many Hungarian Jews it would be bad for their economy.
And this is brutal to here because we'll see it in the
movie that most most of the men and boys of a certain age are in
work camps. And so for them to say this
would be detrimental to our economy is pretty rough.

(13:57):
In the fall of 1943, Prime Minister Calais begins
negotiating with the Allies. Once again.
We're having the Hungarians sortof read the room.
They see where the war is going.They see that Germany might not
actually win this thing. So the best way once again for
them to get out of it with cleannoses and with their old

(14:18):
territories is to align with theAllies.
So start negotiations with the Allies, particularly with the
Soviet Union. Germany gets word of this and
they begin planning to invade Hungary, which they do on March
19th, 1944. Germany invades and they're
pretty unopposed, so they make it pretty quickly through the

(14:40):
country. Horthy is allowed to remain as
Regent. Calais is removed as Prime
Minister and replaced with a proGerman Prime Minister.
Now things start moving pretty quickly for the Hungarian Jewish
population and they start to almost catch up to the rest of
what Europe is experiencing. They start consolidating rural

(15:03):
communities. They start deporting those
consolidated communities to concentration camps, and this
brings us up to the start of themovie.
I think you've given me a nice grade to give my I don't know
what the word is good in my life.
Let's get into the plot. So we get an opening card which

(15:33):
concisely tells us what Katie just told us, but in much less
useful detail. So it says since the start of
World War 2 in 1939, Hungary andally to Germany has been spared
the violence that has swept across Europe.
As the war turns in favor of theUS and its allies, Hungarian
leadership seeks a way out of its alliance with Germany.
Hitler is alerted to Hungary's plans.

(15:54):
Political tensions between the two nations rise.
And in 1944, dot, dot, dot. And then we open on Budapest and
Hungary. And we're right in the middle of
this pitched battle. And we don't really know what's
happening, but we will circle back to it later.
I was like, at this point I was like, what's going on?
So then we moved to nine months before the war, which is

(16:15):
Hungary, which is in spring 1944.
We can't introduce your main character, Alec Cohen.
I feel like Cohen is the most generic Jewish name they could
think of, by the way. But that's fine.
He's fled by Jonas Armstrong, and he meets a pretty girl named
Hannah Shone, played by Hannah Tonton, at a dance.
So it's all everything is all still well.

(16:38):
And the character of Alec Cohen is loosely based on pinches
Tiber Rosenbaum. He could pass as an Aryan, which
which means he could do what he does in the movie, which is
wearing an S S uniform, and not be detected as being Jewish.
Yeah, definitely. Super loosely based on the
events of his life, I think. Quite a fictionalized version.

(17:00):
I feel like they knew what they were doing when they changed his
name and they said that it was inspired by and not based on.
I listened to your episode aboutThe Imitation Game, and I had no
idea it was all made-up. And I think I walked away from
that pretty much as pissed off as you guys were.
So, like, going from that to just inspired by then.

(17:23):
All right, We can lower our expectations a little bit.
They're going to take a little bit more liberties, I guess.
That's fine, yeah. For sure.
The one thing I did like about this scene is that it is this
happy, lighthearted scene where Alec and his friends are
eyeballing some pretty girls andthey're dancing and there's like
music and it's well lit and, youknow, everything's very

(17:45):
colorful. But then we do get an
anti-Semitic incident that occurs at this dance.
And so things look fine on the surface and you could maybe
brush it off if you weren't paying too close attention, but
there are still these like tensions running underneath.
Yeah, they are kicked out of thedance, even though they're not
the ones making trouble. They are kicked out.

(18:06):
We're just pretty telling, I guess.
So Alec and his friend Friends Jacobson played by Mark Ralph
are sent home to their villages by their employer Yosef
Greenberg played by Simon Gunz, who I think is great as the
Germans begin to occupy Hungary or sustainably to boast for
Hungary and defenses quote UN quote.

(18:26):
Yeah, their employer runs a radio repair shop, I think.
And when the Germans start coming in to occupy the country,
he immediately sees the writing on the wall.
And he's like, you should go home and be with your families
because shit's about to go even more sideways than it already
has for us. It made me laugh a little bit
that they were in a radio repairshop and the second they

(18:48):
repaired the radio and turn it on, it's like the news of the
Germans and truly. Timing was perfect.
Excellent. Timing.
Alec has to go to join this mandatory labor service, which
is the work camps that we were talking about earlier for Jewish
men. But he fears the worst.
He can sense that the storm is brewing, so he visits a family

(19:11):
friend to acquire baptism certificates for his family so
they can pretend to be Catholic instead of Jewish if push comes
to shove. From what I've read, that was
actually a pretty common tactic.One of the measures to more
marginalized Hungarian Jews was to treat recent converts to
Judaism as ethnic Jews. So that was one of the ways that

(19:35):
people tried to get around that was to claim that they had been
Christian the entire time. Alec and his friends are being
forced to work at a Hungarian Jewish labor camp in the western
border region. It's back breaking work and
there is not a lot of sympathy if you're sick or you get hurt.
So they witness a friend being shot for being too weak to work,

(19:56):
and they have another friend named Samuel, played by Tom
Beacon, who is in an accident where he hurts his leg and he
basically gets told to stand up and if he can't stand up, he's
going to be killed. But he ends up being saved from
that fate by the arrival of American planes who sort of
strafed the work camp, and Alec and Frank use that opportunity
to jump into the river. They make a narrow escape,

(20:17):
helped by Samuel, who kills s s Officer Sorenzi, played by Mark
Wingett, who tries to stop them.I will say one thing about this
movie, a lot happens in this movie.
It's not one of those movies where we're like, oh, nothing
much is going on right now. Like it's constantly moving.
Maybe a little too much, but at least it's moving.
Yeah, they jump right into the action and then the timeline

(20:39):
kind of just never stops moving the pieces constant.
It's up there for sure. Yeah.
So we get an introduction of Adolf Eichmann, played by
Charles Hubble, and he's one of the major organizers of the
Holocaust. He's pretty scary, I have to
say. But sucking after him as the
leader of the far right Air Cross party French.

(21:01):
So let's play by Simon Hubbard. This is another one of the
things for I'm like, how many evil parties do you want?
There's so many people in this who are evil and they're trying
to out evil each other. Yeah, I thought, number one, I
thought the casting of Eichmann was pretty good.
The guy almost eerily reminded me of Eichmann in some ways.

(21:22):
And in that initial scene where we see him, we actually the
first thing we see him doing is explaining to these Jewish
leaders what the new restrictions are going to be on
Jewish people. And he's very like, Oh yeah,
it's if you guys cooperate, it'sgoing to be totally fine.
And it's just so eerie hearing that from the guy who was one of
the architects of the holo, the cost, the guy who was the pencil

(21:46):
pusher who embodied the banalityof evil.
There's a line in Operation Finale, which I watched after
this, which is about the Mossad tracking down Adolf Eichmann in
1960 after he evaded justice for15 years.
And they talk about how he convinced rabbis to load the
trains themselves, which is, youknow, he was just a guy who was

(22:06):
like, yeah, we're all just beingreasonable here.
If you guys comply and everything will be fine.
And he was just very successful in making people believe that.
So Alec and French return home from their escape from the work
camp, and they find that their families are gone.
They've been taken away. There's someone else living in
their houses, which I'm sure must be just a really
discomforting discovery. So they go to Budapest instead

(22:28):
to try and track down their old employer, Yosef.
And they also meet Hannah again,the girl that they met at the
party, And they realize that allof their old acquaintances have
been sent to live in Yellow starhouses.
So in 1944, the mayor of Budapest issued A decree
identifying about 2000 apartmentbuildings around Budapest where

(22:51):
the Jewish population would be forced to live.
It was normally in buildings already occupied heavily by
Jewish families. In this decree, not only does he
say we're going to be moving allof the Jewish population into
these buildings, he says like well, well you know, the typical
Jew doesn't need a lot of livingspace anyway.

(23:12):
So these multi room apartments will just put one family in each
room of each apartment. And so instead of one family
occupying an apartment with maybe 2 bedrooms, a dining room
and a living room, we're going to put a family in this bedroom
and a family in this bedroom anda family in the living room and
a family in the dining room. And then the decree also lays

(23:34):
out a square footage that if a room exceeds that size, then
they'll put an additional familyin that room.
Yeah. So they're just squeezing people
in. And then when you look at the
map to see how many buildings were designated as yellow star

(23:55):
houses, I mean, it's just insane.
And the decree also said, oh, bythe way, you have to do this
within the next 7 days. So all of these families only
had seven days to kind of uproot, figure out where they're
going to go, and quite possibly move into an apartment with four
or five other families. I'll put a link to a website

(24:16):
where you can see the map with the other houses on it.
It's wild to look at. It's really cool, but also kind
of really horrible at the same time.
Yeah, I took a walk around my neighborhood just to kind of see
some of these buildings and yeah, it's wild.
And then kind of look around my own apartment here.

(24:36):
I think there would definitely be at least five other families
living in my apartment, you know, And as you can imagine,
with so many people crammed together in a living space,
diseases just ripped through these buildings.
It's incredibly dehumanizing as well to have all your things
taken from you and just to be shunted into an area with other

(24:57):
people and just treated like youdon't deserve to have any living
space. And they're also having a lot of
their personal possessions confiscated in the movie, The
Woman in Gold, art, jewelry, butalso radios, bicycles, anything
that gives you a contact with the greater world.
Kind of goes into what you were saying about that

(25:17):
dehumanization. So we got introduced to Colonel
Scrozzini, played by Bern Gorman, who's angry that regions
make lush Worthy, played by Ben Kingsley, isn't important enough
to use for everyone's liking. Scrozzini will put back a
pleasure and he will be met somemore because the Hungarian Jews

(25:38):
will be getting sports passports.
And we also get surprised the introduction of Nicholas Worthy,
junior played by and Taylor doing a fabulous accent.
Fabulous might be a stretch, buthe's really doing his best.
I did not know he was in this movie even though I've seen
gifts of him in this movie on Tumblr and everywhere else.

(25:59):
I'm like, how did I not realize that was this movie?
It's the best kind of jump scared.
Yeah, I also want to shout out Burn Gorman, who's just plays a
terrifying Nazi in this and is sort of this sort of the stand
in for all of the evil. Basically.
You know, Ben Kingsley is out here being very reluctant to
deport any Jewish people or to enact any of these roles.

(26:22):
And Scarzani is out here being like, no, you have to.
And he's Hitler's representativeand he's the one sort of
representing all all of the larger evil that is forcing
Miklos Shorthy hand. And he has a scary ass looking
facial scar as well which I really think adds to it.
Yeah, what do we think of Shane John's performance in this
movie? No, I mean, it's always a
pleasure to see him. It's hard for me to divorce him

(26:46):
from his role as Doc Rowe in my mind because it's just like, I
don't know. Yeah, there was a couple scenes
of stand up, particularly in my mind, the one where their
secretary gets shot in front of them.
Yeah, there was a couple of moments where I thought he
really outwardly acted a lot of internal turmoil really well.
But I don't like, I mean I don'tknow a ton about the real life

(27:07):
guy or anything so I guess I can't really speak to how well
acted it is in that. Respect.
I just thought he was very serious in this.
That flinch that he gives when you know he's leaning on Ben
Kingsley and what you're just talking about when the secretary
gets shot. That was really good.
And kind of, I want to know whathe was thinking too, because you

(27:27):
kind of have to bring your A+ game every day when you're
acting next to Ben Kingsley. That's got to be intimidating.
No, absolutely for sure. So Hannah, she's walking home
and these two creepy Nazi officers start to follow her,
and they clearly have nefarious intentions, so they follow her
all the way home. And then, of course, she lives

(27:48):
in an area where it's known thatJewish people live, so they
really feel no compunction aboutjust busting into the house and
dragging her off to a bedroom and attempting to rape her while
her family's in the other room and they shoot her dad.
I think it is. And it's this whole, like,
terrible, chaotic scene. And then Alec busts in and saves
her. But this does result in two dead

(28:09):
Nazis, which as you can imagine is a problem, although Alec well
used it as an opportunity as well.
This year reminded me a little bit of the ceiling Fury, except
it felt actually terrible instead of trying to make it
less terrible, which is what Fury tries to do so.
Yeah, I think, and this is just my own opinion and it's probably

(28:31):
a bad opinion, but I feel like this movie just skirts tropes
and I'm like ready to cringe andthen I don't.
So with the trope of oh, the uniform just happens to fit.
Like we see that a lot in movies, but it worked and
because it has to and Oh yeah, the real life guy, it fit him
and the love interest and everything and I'm just waiting

(28:53):
for it to be cheesy and it neverreally pushes it too far.
I wonder if that's also, I feel like this movie, I do like it, I
just want to say, but I feel like it doesn't go in really
deep into anything because it's trying to show so much.
You don't really get to linger on a lot of things.
So maybe that's part of the reason.

(29:15):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, lots of weapons grade terrible shit
happens to people in this movie,but also lots of weapons grade
terrible shit was happening to people.
So I guess truth is stranger than fiction, yeah.
And the Swiss location NX, also known as as the class house.
Hannah's uncle Mikloshan, playedby Simon Dutton, is in charge of
distributing Swiss passports to Jewish Hungarians.

(29:37):
And he works for our car lots, played by William Help.
He's a Swiss diplomat in Budapest.
And he's credited with saving 62,000 years from the Holocaust.
So that's a lot. I can't even begin to imagine
how many people there is. But Alec working as a delivery
man for the passage. But this is a family being moved

(29:57):
down and rescues the lion survivor, a child named Evan
that he then takes to hide out in the local convent.
And this is important for a letter.
Yeah, I found that the articulation of who Carl Lutz
was and his relationship with everybody wasn't that clear in
the movie. I had to kind of look it up
after and then I was like, oh, OK, that makes sense.

(30:20):
Yeah, it made sense to me at thevery end of the movie, but not
during. It's kind of weird.
He's just there in the background here.
Like who is this guy? At first I was, I'm like, I knew
that Carl Lutz would be kind of showing up.
But when we met Hannah's uncle, I was like, oh, is that him?
Because here he is in the glass house and I missed the

(30:41):
introduction of what his name was.
And then it was like, Oh no, this guy over here is Carl Lutz.
Yeah. So basically what he did was he
had been given permission to write Swiss passports for
Hungarian Jews who had Swiss family.
And he's very generously interpreted that as, oh, so when
you say I can write 8000 passports, what you really mean

(31:03):
is I can write out passports for8000 people and their families.
And so he was really using his diplomatic skills to the maximum
ability to try and give as many people as possible protection
from the state. Yeah.
So Alec is working there. His buddy French is also working
there. And while French is out doing
his deliveries, he gets stopped by the gendarmes who are the

(31:25):
local police and and his other friend have to Don the s s
uniforms from the two dead Nazisthat they killed to role play
him out of jail. And man, I feel like this is a
situation where if you just heard it described you could be
like, oh that's kind of hijinks and shenanigans but it's super
tense. I was like.

(31:46):
This is never going to work. When this I was like, this isn't
going to work. He's just going to die.
They're going to be too late or something, which is what the
movie tries to make you believe for two seconds because they go
into a cell and you think it's their friend, but it's another
prisoner that's dead. So you're like, Oh no, it's a

(32:06):
misrect. But man, how does this work?
When we did ex company and they were pretending to be Nazis, I
was like, this is not going to work.
But it worked out too and I guess a lot of stuff works.
I think in a lot of situations where people are scared of
getting in trouble for doing doing something wrong, if you

(32:27):
have enough bluster and you commit to the bit hard enough,
people are willing to be like, well, I don't want to make waves
and maybe I'm wrong. So I'll let whatever this has
happened. There's a really good episode of
the podcast Behind the Bastards about Raul Wallenberg, who is, I
want to see like a Swedish diplomat.
But similarly, he saved a lot ofJews from the Holocaust because

(32:47):
basically he had tall white men bluster.
So he would just show up to places and he'd be like, who's
in charge here? You tell me what's going on.
I want these these people over here now.
And if you don't, I'll speak to your supervisor, blah, blah,
blah. This man was just like commit to
the bit all the way to the wall.And because of that, he was able
to see a lot of people because, you know, people would be like,
ah, he's probably in charge. Like, let's just let him do it.

(33:10):
Yeah, and I thought it was pretty smart too, that Aleck was
playing off the German superiority, how they felt that
they were superior to even theirown allies, the Hungarians.
And so when he's talking down tothe Aerocross officers, that was
incredibly smart on his part. And then I guess it really
worked out in real life too, as was mentioned before, that the

(33:31):
guy Alec is based on was very Aryan passing.
He was very blonde and spoke really fantastic German.
So he could, like you're saying,bluster his way through it too.
On the other side of the story, like the higher up story Orthy
Junior or Shenzhen, that's what I'm just going to call it,

(33:51):
delivers Hungarian surrender to the Russians.
But before he can do so the documents are intercepted.
The Germans attacked the city and Horty is forced to resign.
After he resigns the era cross party takes over and they are
allied with the Nazis obviously.So in the movie Horty Junior is

(34:12):
used to pressure his father in submission and he is beat up.
He was beat up in real life but he was not taken back to his
father but instead taken to mathhouse and concentration camp.
So they've taken some liberties,I think, again to make healthy,
not junior, but the actual healthy, slightly more

(34:33):
sympathetic by having him care for his son.
So I understand the choice, but you know, it's a choice.
And we get to see Shane Taylor for a couple more scenes.
Yeah, so obviously now that Germany is all up in everyone's
business, Alec is finding that he has to Don the uniform again
because Jews are starting to be rounded up in earnest.

(34:55):
And this time he has to try and save Hannah's sister Rachel,
played by Flora Spencer Longhurst.
Unfortunately, he has a run in with Captain Varga, played by
Andrew Brooke. This guy will surface again
later. He's this really sort of hard
ass, like leader of the gendarmes I guess, and he sucks
big time. He shoots Rachel despite being

(35:17):
told not to, and then he sort ofjust sails away.
I'm concerned about the havoc that he has just caused.
The scene is so sad. I for once thought it was going
to work out. So again, I'm fooled now.
The other one I thought it was not going to work out and it
worked out and this one I thought it was going to work out
and it did not work out. There's terror in her.

(35:39):
Suspense is just, yeah, I hate saying that such a terrible
scene is one of my favorite scenes, but yeah, it's pretty
incredible. Yeah, they have them all lined
up facing the wall, and they're shooting them in the head one at
a time. And the people next to her are
falling like 1 by 1. And you can just see her sort of
like tensing and jumping every time there's a gunshot.

(36:00):
And just the terror on her face is so incredibly acted.
That scene really got me. I like the choice.
They like to just stay on her face the entire time while the
shooting is happening. It's very powerful.
Yeah. Despite his failure, Alec starts
to use the uniform more often totry and save as many people as

(36:22):
he can, but also trying to find out what happened to his family
who have been taken to Oswich. He encountered his progress
again on one of his rescue heists and became some series,
as can be expected because progress sucks and Alex's friend
is killed and this is run for says he wants nothing to do with

(36:42):
us anymore. He's done this made me almost
cry. He's like, haven't very saved
enough people, but Alec is like,no, I want to keep going.
Yeah, and I did like that the upclose and personal villain who
we see doing The Dirty work of carrying out the Holocaust is
just some Hungarian guy. He's not even a Nazi.

(37:03):
He's just someone who is like, yeah, I'll use this as an
opportunity to cater to my worstinstincts and just behave
abominably. Yeah.
So Alec stops the shipment of Jews that are being moved by
truck as the rail lines have been destroyed.
And we get like a side scene where we see someone telling
Adolf Eichmann about this and Eichmann being like, let me put

(37:23):
my best bureaucrat hat on and figure out the best way that we
can continue deporting and murdering people.
So Alec stops one of these shipments, but a higher ranking
Nazi rolls out Lieutenant Krieger, played by Charles
Death, and he takes over the situation.
And where Alec is trying to savepeople, this guy is, of course,
a real Nazi. And he's like, well, you're not
checking their paperwork good enough.

(37:44):
Like, drag people out of there if they don't have the right
paperwork. And so Alec is put in this
terrible position where he has to pull Jews with false papers
into the firing line in order tomaintain his cover.
And that scene, I thought, was particularly brutal.
We also get to see a little bit more of little less.
We get to see him a little bit more and we get to see it affect

(38:05):
him because he's the one handingout these passwords.
And there's a lady that's tryingto get onto the track with her
child and she's holding up a piece of newspaper instead of a
actual passport. And he lets run and then later
she's pulled off the track againand it's just horrible.
The scene is really they don't shy away from showing you how

(38:28):
horrible it was. Yeah.
And I think it gets articulated really clearly how absurd it is
that for a regime like the Nazi regime, where everything was
like orderly and they were usingcomputers and they were keeping
track of everything. And then it's like something
like a document or a piece of paper can be used as something
that can save someone from beingmurdered.

(38:48):
It's like, oh, if you have the right piece of paper, then you
don't die today. I just think it's crazy how
people like Gluts were able to use that German desire to follow
the rules and be orderly and maintain the paperwork and all
that stuff to their own advantage.
And I remember in the Behind theBastards episode, I was talking
about, about Raul Wallenberg, also a guy who was writing

(39:12):
passports for people. And it reached a point where he
would get on top of the train and he would be writing
passports and throwing them intothe train as the train was
rolling away. And it's just so crazy to think
that as people are being taken away to death camps, something
that could save you as just something as silly as like a
little piece of paper. Yeah, there's a great line in
Andor that's like, I'm forced touse the tools of my oppressors

(39:34):
to take them down or something like that.
The thing that I liked about this scene, too, was showing how
Alec was letting people, even with fake pieces of paper, fake
passes like New Sprint or something, letting them on the
trucks. And then he has to look them in
the eye as he takes them back off as they're separated from
their kids or their loved ones. So it was like you really got to

(39:55):
feel for the character at this point.
Almost had these people save. It's November 1944.
The Russians are on their way, and his uncle Mcclos is killed
by the Germans. And I think Lutz is almost
killed. He just about talks his way out
of it and everything is very chaotic.

(40:16):
And Alec, who's being shot at bythe Red Army, as we see in the
very beginning of the movie, he's pretending to be dead as he
lies among a group of other uniformed officers, and suddenly
all the panic from the beginningmakes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I guess the the one time when it's not useful to be
wearing a Nazi uniform is when the Red Army are advancing

(40:38):
across the city and shooting at you.
Oops. Yeah.
So meanwhile, Hannah has gone tothe convent, if you recall her
and Alec rescued this kid and took him to this convent where
he could be safe and protected in this orphanage.
And now that the Russians are coming, Hannah is going there to
attempt to help them escape the city.

(41:00):
And so Alec has to use the U1 more time because Hannah and the
children get stopped by some more gendarmes, I believe, and
he has to go out there and prevent them from being shot.
And it's a whole situation. Everyone's sort of succumbing to
the very chaotic nature of what's happening.

(41:20):
And meanwhile, there's this Naziwho's like, yeah, well, I am
going to shoot these people. They're just Jews, who cares?
And him trying to reason with this guy and being like, well,
the Russians are here, like, there's no point in killing more
people. They're killing Germans like
it's over. Yeah, One thing I wish this
movie had given me a bit more sense of a sense of scale.

(41:41):
Like, I've got no idea what the size of this city is.
I can't really tell from the movie, but I imagine it's quite
a big city and the distances that were covered were quite
long. But he can't really tell from
the movie because it's so fast-paced.
He's going to get them one second and the next second you
see him get to them. So I've got no idea how long any

(42:03):
of this took to do. Same, and I live here.
I mean, there's like a river that bisects the city, so I'm
assuming that everything's taking place on just one side.
From what I understand about theSoviets moving into the city is
it was incredibly heated, but also every single block was a
hard fight and so it was just a slog for the Soviets to get

(42:24):
through. So it does make sense to me that
Alec has time to move around before the Soviets reach him.
Right, so Alec has discovered atthe very last moment, because
our orphan kid Adam shouts out his name.
You're like, no, don't do it. Don't say it.
And then he gets shot by Krieger, and Krieger is in turn

(42:47):
shot for insubordination by Eichmann's second in command,
Dieter Wislawseni, who's left incharge because Eichmann is
fucked up to Berlin. He's like, this is no longer my
mess. I'm just going to get the hell
out of here and then. I love that part when they
reveal it, they're like he's gone.
They make it pretty tense because Alec is on the ground

(43:08):
and you think he's dying, like he looks to be dying.
Yeah, They really wanted us to think he was dying.
They really dropped out because 13 years later, it's 1957, I
think they're in New York. They're at a wedding.
And we don't know whose wedding it is.
And we only see Hannah at 1st. And we're like, oh, no, Alec,

(43:28):
he's died. He's not here.
But then the groom at the wedding is doing this speech,
and we learned that that's Adam,and he was adopted by Hannah and
Alec, who did survive. And then the movie closes out
with this. Nice little happy family.
Let me just tell you how long I have to think about who this guy
was. I was like, wait, because we

(43:49):
don't see Adam a whole lot in the movie as a child.
I'm like, wait, this is the sameguy.
But yes, it is. I feel like the movie does a lot
of like don't worry this will matter later.
Don't forget about this guy, it will be relevant later.
He'll have a totally different face and he'll be aged, but you
know, you should know what this is.
He's pretty like all of the guysin this movie are quite pretty,

(44:11):
I have to say. Would you like to read these
novel length end cards or would you like me to read them?
You already know the answer to this.
OK, All right. So we get a big old wall of
text. Actually, that's not true.
What they do is kind of a thing that I like is where they show
when they're talking about what happened to each character after
the war. They show what they looked like

(44:33):
in the movie, and then they alsoshow what they looks like in
real life. So I kind of did like that.
And the end cards say this film was inspired by the courage of
Pinches Rosenbaum, whose passports and rescue missions
saved thousands of lives. His family was murdered in
Auschwitz along with 500,000 Hungarian Jews. s s Lieutenant
Colonel Otto Scorsini surrendered to the US Army after

(44:55):
trials and reprieves. He died in 1975.
Dieter Whistleseni was hanged in1948 for war crimes.
Ferent Selassie was hanged in 1946 for war crimes and high
treason. Arrow Cross.
Captain Corbach was hanged in 1946 for war crimes.
Adolf Eichman escaped to urgent Tina and was later captured by
Israeli agents. He was convicted for crimes
against humanity and hanged in 1962.

(45:17):
Regent Horthe and his son were held in German imprisonments
until after the war. They never returned to Hungary
due to the Soviet occupation anddied in Portugal in 1957 and
1993, respectively. Cara let's establish the Swiss
Legion, which is the Glass Houseand is honored for the lives he
saved. He died in 1975.
After the war, Mr. Rosenbaum seldom spoke of his heroic

(45:39):
deeds. He died in 1980 and his wife
wife died in 2010. They were survived by three
children. In 2005, the Memorial Shoes on
the Danube Bank was dedicated inBudapest to honor the victim's
murder during the Nazi and Era cross terror.

(46:00):
I do like that we got to see what happens to literally
everyone we've seen in the movie.
You got to see where they end up, which most of them
thankfully got convicted. The bad guys on the right.
Yeah, it's nice to see Nazis getwhat they deserve, for sure.
Yeah, there's something oddly satisfying about seeing that one
after another. And he was hanged for his war

(46:20):
crimes. And he was hanged for his war
crimes. And he was hanged for his war
crimes. Yeah, deeply satisfying for
sure. Have you been to see the
memorial shoes? I have.
I mean, they show it at the end of the movie.
It's really simple, but it's deeply moving.
The story behind why there are only shoes on the bank is that

(46:43):
the Arrow Cross made the people they were about to shoot kick
their shoes off. They would shoot them and push
them into the river, and then the Arrow Cross would take the
shoes and resell them. It's kind of like a personal
profit. Why?
Goddammit. Yeah, everything has to have
like a really gross, really uglyangle like that.

(47:03):
Everything. If you're ever in Budapest, let
me know. We can go on a tour of all of
the memorials. I.
Really want to go in that sense.Yeah, that sounds great.
I'm also reminded of a few weeksago, we talked about the women
who flew for Hitler and one of the female test pilots, Hannah,

(47:24):
right? One of her friends, I guess, had
somehow come into contact with sort of, I guess, the periphery
of the Holocaust. He had seen this like, warehouse
full of like 800,000 shoes. And at the time there was, you
know, the German regime was doing its best to downplay what
was happening with the citizens and, you know, not fully explain
what was going on. So he went to Hannah and he was

(47:47):
like, look, I think things are much worse than they're telling
us. And he explained to her the
warehouse full of shoes and everything.
And she was like, no, she's like, I spoke with Himmler
personally. He told me that all that's not
happening and it's not true and blah blah, blah.
And this guy was like, but wheredid the 800,000 shoes come from?
That was just the thing in his mind that he couldn't get
unstuck. Just made me think of that, you

(48:08):
know, just the awful grim housekeeping of killing that
many people. What do you do with all their
things you know? And it's like that in Icebridge
as well, right? They have a room full of shoes
still today. You can go look at.
It's just such a simple thing, but it's so effectively showing
that many people have died, sucha visceral reminder of death.

(48:32):
Yeah, I mean, what a marker thatsomebody was there as their
shoes, their literal footprints.When you think of these numbers
like 700,001 million .5, that's a number that I personally can't
comprehend. So when you put it into
something that you can actually look at and touch, like shoes,
you see this physical representation.

(48:53):
It really hits you. There is one scene we didn't
talk about that I'd like to mention real quick.
See what happened to Alex family.
In a brief scene, we see the ovens of Ice Ridge and we see
the German officers standing outside it.
It just gives me chills just to think about the directional

(49:14):
people are foreseeing, people being guessed and burned and
it's just horrible. I can't even.
How can you do that to another human being?
I think it is shockingly easy and that's why it's happened
time and time again. Yeah, it definitely makes it
easier when you spend so much time dehumanizing them and
reducing them to less than human.

(49:37):
Yeah, yeah. And it, that scene, too,
reminded me of the scene in Masters of the Air when Rosie
sees the burnt corpses in the camp.
And they just did that set really well where you have the
char going across the walls and everything and across the snow.
It could very well be the same place.
Yeah, I do feel like in terms ofstructuring this movie, that

(49:59):
particular scene, similar to some of the Eichmann scenes and
stuff, I was kind of like, whichstory are you trying to tell
either? This is LX point of view and we
know what he knows. Or it felt like they could have
done a better job focusing on one thing or the other rather
than trying to throw all this different stuff in for us as an

(50:20):
audience. Because when we saw that his
family were taken to Auschwitz, it didn't immediately bear any
relevance in the film because hedoesn't know that his family
aren't aren't Auschwitz. I don't know, I.
Agree, like I said, I think the stories are really interesting
but the movie making choices aren't that strong at all times.
I'm glad there is a movie about this bar because otherwise they

(50:42):
would have never known about this part of history.
So there we go. I would did want to point out,
yeah, while they tried to do a lot in just a little amount of
time, because I do agree with what you were saying about we
didn't actually have to know. We could just know all that Alec
knows. They got a lot of little things
right. That was pretty impressed with

(51:03):
that. A lot of productions, I think
get wrong the costuming, the hair.
Whenever I'm watching a piece ofmedia that's set in World War 2,
I always look at the women's dresses because that's the
easiest thing to get right. And if it's wrong, it kind of
like drop kicks me right out of the scene.
I'm not a costuming expert or anything like that, but I'm a

(51:26):
pretty avid swing dancer and so I've been around a lot of
vintage gowns. Another scene was the dancing.
It is done really well when it'sdone really poorly and bigger
named movies. The mention of Bald Z when Alec
and Fedence get back to Budapestfrom trying to find their

(51:46):
families in the country and they're in the Yellow Star house
and this woman says, oh, they'refine.
I got this postcard from my sister.
They went to this resort called Bald Z that was a code name for
Auschwitz. And I've read somewhere that the
Nazis made specifically, particularly the Hungarian
deportees, fill these postcards out, send them to their friends

(52:09):
and family to say I'm fine, I'm in great health, this place is
beautiful, you should come visit.
And they would send these postcards, but they would also
make note of the address these postcards were being sent to to
inform future deportations. Yeah, it's once again everything
has to have an awful angle. Just.

(52:31):
Everything's so geopolitical. Yeah, perhaps predictably, every
new thing I learned about the Nazis is somehow worse than the
last thing I learned about the Nazis.
All right, how many and probablywell tailored Nazi uniforms out

(52:53):
of 10 would you write this movie, Katie?
I'm probably rating it too high.I think I would give it a 7 just
because they set out to tell a story that wasn't known at all,
and I think they accomplished that.
They flirted with some tropes that they didn't quite flush out

(53:16):
to the point of cringe, and theygot a lot of little details.
They really nailed them, so I respect that.
I think people expect a lot out of World War 2 Movies Now thanks
to the Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg World War 2 cinematic
universe. So for something that wasn't a
Spanx production, I think it was.

(53:38):
It's all right. It held down.
I have a feeling I'm in the minority, though.
I don't know. How I found never heard Steven
Spielberg and Tom Hanks be referred to as Spanx before.
I have no idea where I got that.My husband and I just started
using that. I don't know, because yeah, I'm
super nuts about World War 2 andhe's more of like the World War

(53:59):
One guy. And so it would just became a
joke like, oh, another Spanx movie, Yeah.
Well, I will also be using it now because I love that.
Perfect. It's.
Ours. Now you will kindly borrow
That's from you. Do it, spread it, tell your
friends. Should I go?
Sure. I will rate this movie 6 1/2 in

(54:19):
probably well tailored Nancy uniforms.
I didn't hate it. My time was false, I'm having
the literal worst week of my life and it actually kept me
entertained for two hours. So I've already said most of
what I wanted to say about it atthe beginning where I think
they're trying to do a little bit too much.

(54:40):
I would have preferred a slightly more concise storyline
to the thing of trying to do everything all at once.
But the acting was fine. I had some highlights in it for
sure. It did have much levity, though.
I maybe sometimes would like to have had a little bit of a

(55:01):
breather in between all the hardships.
I would probably watch it again.So I don't know why I'm only
giving it a 6 1/2, but I would watch it again, and it's made me
curious about Hungary, so there's that too.
And that's it for me, I think. How about you, Sam?
I will say I wasn't bored. Found the pacing was pretty good

(55:22):
and there's lots of really tensescenes, but not in such a way
where you know how, like if everything's tense, nothing is
tense. Like I did find that there was
enough sort of breather time between the tense parts that
they still had the amount of tension that I think the film
makers were aiming for. And like I said at the
beginning, I did think there were a couple particularly well

(55:46):
acted parts. And yeah, I also liked the
opportunity to learn a little bit more about Hungary during
World War 2. And I like a movie where there's
at least one woman with something to do, so that's
always good. So I guess I'm also going to
give it 6 1/2 and probably well tailored Nazi uniforms out of
10. I probably wouldn't have thought

(56:07):
to watch it if Katie hadn't brought it up.
So I really appreciate you putting that on our radar.
No problem. When we found out that we were
moving here, it's been my goal to learn more about our and this
was having such a huge interest in World War 2.
This was my entryway, so thank you for the opportunity to come
and Yep about it. If you do find another movie or

(56:29):
TV show in Hungary, you're very welcome to come back and talk
about it and tell us what it is for us, by the way.
Yes, anytime you need way too much background information or
anything like that or context, let me know because I love like
I love your podcast and I love just World War 2 media.
I have to put my hyperfixation to work somehow, and these hours

(56:53):
and hours I've spent watching obscure TV miniseries and movies
and things like that, so. All right, let's talk about what
we're reading. Mark, are you reading anything
new? I am pausing on all the reading
this week. I don't remember what I was
reading before. I'm sure I'll get back into it.
I think we have an interesting book coming up called Thrillers

(57:16):
War. That's a spy book that probably
going to be interesting once I get to it, if I can clear my
brain a little bit. She doesn't read it.
How about you, Katie? What are you reading?
I have a book I'm finishing up on the 1956 revolution in
Hungary, the student LED uprising against the Soviet

(57:37):
Union. Nice.
Are there any World War Two books about Hungary you would
recommend? Have you read on it?
So most of my books are still not here.
I had one book that it's literally called The Shortest
History of Hungary, and that's what kind of kicked off this
time period for me. I haven't found any specifically
World War 2, but what I'm kind of eagerly awaiting when my

(57:58):
books finally arrived. I've been on a combat nurse's
memoir kick, so I read helmets and Lipstick, and then I'm
waiting on, I picked up one but a nurse for the Tuskegee Airmen.
And then, yeah, super excited about that.
And then another one that's kindof a compilation of a bunch of
different memoirs called And If I Shall Perish.

(58:20):
I'm definitely going to need breaks between them, though,
because it's. Yeah, it's a lot.
Yeah, I believe it. I mean, those actually all sound
super interesting to me. I wish my to read pile weren't
like 47,000,000 bucks tall. But yeah, I'm reading Martha
Gellhorn, A 20th Century Life byCaroline Moorhead, which is a
biography about war correspondent Martha Gellhorn,

(58:41):
who was briefly married to Ernest Hemingway.
And she would fucking hate that I referenced that about her.
But that is how a lot of people would probably remember her.
So yeah, we might talk about herpretty soon on an episode.
All right, Shall I close this upthen?
Katie, thank you so much for being on with us this week.
That was. Really fun for having me, yeah.

(59:02):
Thank you everybody for listening to another episode of
Rosie. You can follow us wherever you
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wherever you want. We would very much like it if

(59:23):
you did and. Send this episode to a friend.
Do it. Ah, sorry, yeah, Sunday off, I
said to all your friends. Go and do it.
See you next week. Bye.